Thirty minutes into the 49ers’ second annual “State of the Franchise” event, Alex Smith’s name still hadn’t been mentioned.

There was all the talk you could ever want about the draft picks, a beautiful rendering of the proposed stadium, and plenty of praise for Patrick Willis and Vernon Davis.

But not a word about the starting quarterback.

Sixty minutes into the event, Smith still had not been praised, raised or even quickly referenced.

Finally, at the end of the 90-minute presentation, taking a final question from the audience about the team’s general prospects, team president Jed York volunteered that Smith is a large part of what the 49ers are doing.

End of event. Crowd roars, then disperses. Interesting.

I’m not saying that the 49ers bigwigs were signaling any uncertainty about Smith by speaking so much about others and so little about him during this pre-camp pep rally.

I’m saying it’s the psychological opposite: The 49ers don’t consider Smith’s status a live issue, and they have turned almost all attention to other areas of the team.

They know he needs to play well, but coach Mike Singletary and York are heading into training camp assuming Smith is a fixed asset. In their minds, Smith will work diligently, run the offense and succeed.

“I’m very excited about what I’ve seen, as well as the coaching staff, as well as our players,” Singletary said after the event.

“It’s very nice to hear that ‘Wow, Alex has really done a really great job stepping up. He’s really doing a great job getting the ball to the receivers. Getting the ball out of his hand.’

“You hear the coordinator, you hear the other coaches, you hear leaders on the team rally around him. And his work ethic is second to none.”

This comes after all the years of Smith hype, followed by worry, followed by frustration, followed by injury, followed by confusion.

And it comes on a team that has a bit of history with quarterback obsession, glorification, occasional ridicule and nonstop debate.

This is also the team that ignored the chance to acquire Donovan McNabb a few months ago, that passed multiple times on drafting Jimmy Clausen and that only a year ago considered Shaun Hill its starter and Smith a reclamation-project backup.

So if York, Singletary and G.M. Trent Baalke believe so deeply in Smith that they need no other realistic quarterback option, it is a conclusion that happened relatively swiftly.

And it is a conclusion that had better be correct.

You can see why the 49ers would want to mark down Smith as a sure thing. If you count Smith as a potential top quarterback, the 49ers are deeper and more skilled than they have been in almost a decade, and possibly one of the top 10 teams in the league.

“I think we’re as talented as any team out there,” Singletary told the crowd of about 1,000.

Singletary clearly wants to push things by leaning on his coaching staff to get the younger players on the field more swiftly than in the past.

He seems to have drawn a fluorescent circle around safety Taylor Mays, a second-round pick with outrageous speed and size for his position.

And Singletary unquestionably wants the two offensive linemen picked in the first round — Anthony Davis and Mike Iupati — to step in quickly and help give the 49ers “an offensive line with teeth that can bite.”

Singletary said he doesn’t want his coaches to “sit back and say, ‘Well, this guy’s too young, this guy’s too immature’ “…

“If the kid wants to play and he can play, let’s figure out a way to bridge that so he can play. I want the best guys on the field.”

That is a coach with a lot of confidence about his locker room; no shock, obviously, coming from Singletary.

On the eve of training camp, the 49ers’ leaders weren’t guaranteeing anything — as York did at the end of the 2008 season, when he basically guaranteed a playoff team in 2009, which did not happen.

But they’re still very confident. So confident that they didn’t feel the need to mention their quarterback for the first 89 minutes of a 90-minute presentation.

They are confident in Smith. They are confident in the roster. They are confident in themselves. They are just fine-tuning for inevitable greatness now.

If they’re right, the 49ers should do very well in 2010. But again: They had better be right about all of it.